• Adobe After Effects

  puppet heavy animation: tips?

  Posted by Brett Celinski on June 28, 2011 at 9:17 pm

  Sup folks. I’m working on an animation that relies heavily on animating drawings using the puppet tool. I decided on working with psd files and rendering each layered effect as a separate tiff sequence. I had a nightmarish outcome trying to wrestle with quicktime and using pngs for the layers, which crucified the render. (If I hear that sheep one more time…)

  What I changed: png’s to psds
  effects like cc repetile were massively cut down. I animated the movement of layers with offset instead of using the camera for z depth. I’m now staying away from too many glows and color corrective effects for the ‘raw animation’.

  I’m also keeping the puppet mesh sizes as reasonable as I can.

  I am running an i7 8 core lenovo thinkcentre with 12gb of ram. With MP on, I’m leaving 4 gb of ram for other apps and allocating 2 gb for each cpu.

  Any other tips on keeping render times low, other than rendering each portion of the animation separately?

  Brett Celinski replied 14 years, 9 months ago 38,872 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Brett Celinski

  June 29, 2011 at 12:38 am

  Thanks for the tip about opengl. I had already switched to the MP settings you posted and the difference is striking.

  My best bet remains with separately rendering each layer with alphas and conserving effect settings.
• 

  Brett Celinski

  July 23, 2011 at 5:33 am

  I’m running into problems with some comps failing to render as a tiff sequence with alpha channels. My animation is made up of many layers of 3d shapes to make up a cartoon landscape and in it I stick my 2d puppet animated characters I rendered separately as tiff sequences. When I try to render the background landscape comp, AE either freezes or just dies, no error or anything. The landscape images are small manageable psd files so I don’t understand how the ram could be suffering with my system, but apparently it does from looking at the processes. I am using the same MP settings Dave recommended but this particular composition has proven difficult to manage.

  Again, the comp is nothing more than 3d tif sequences (the characters), precomped 3d psd files, and sure target 2 camera data. Obviously it’s one of these causing the trouble, but again I’m at a loss; pretty new to this stuff.

  Running an i7 8 core lenovo thinkcentre with 12gb of ram. With MP on, I’m leaving 4 gb of ram for other apps and allocating 2 gb for each cpu.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up